New Potter film mirrors darker reality
Fairy tales usually work by conjuring fantastic metaphors for children’s fears and then reassuring them that those fears can be overcome. There’s nothing necessarily namby-pamby about that. Often the message to kids is that they are stronger than they believe themselves to be. And sometimes, the characters in fairy tales have to suffer loss in order to figure that out.
The fourth of the Harry Potter movies, “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” directed by Mike Newell, stands that approach on its head. What’s reassuring in this picture – for all purposes, a horror film – isn’t the defeat of what frightens us but the confirmation that we should be frightened, that things really are as bad as we imagine them to be.
“Everything’s going to change now, isn’t it?” asks Emma Watson’s Hermione, a scared and sick little smile on her face, at the finish of “Goblet of Fire.” Harry, Hermione and Ron’s uncertainty about what awaits them in their three remaining years at Hogwarts describes, I think, what life is like for many of us at this moment, wondering what awaits us in the final three years of the Bush presidency.
Our days consist of a simultaneous desire to know the worst and the temptation to shut it out, to ignore this morning’s paper or tonight’s news, to hope that the next three years will evaporate like a nightmare, leaving no trace behind.
We know differently, and that’s what makes “Goblet of Fire” so potent. The film ends on a pause, with Harry, Hermione and Ron having suffered a loss, retrenching before the battles they know are to come.
It would be cheap (and, for an American, narcissistic) to reduce the meanings of “Harry Potter” to a political metaphor. (George W. Bush as Voldemort? That’s too easy.) But Rowling’s stories, the central pop-culture myth of our era, are rich and resonant enough to ensure that they will last, despite the carping of snobs like Harold Bloom and A.S. Byatt who feel threatened by the deep and wide response to the Potter books. And one of the things for which we turn to art is to find some reflection of our immediate experience.
Put it this way: If Laurence Olivier could use “Henry V” as a message of perseverance and courage to Britons pounded by the bombings and deprivations of World War II, then it’s not outlandish to find in the Harry Potter saga a reflection of the fears that beset us now.
Sometimes the atmosphere a movie imparts is stronger than its structure. “Goblet of Fire” is a strange film, misshapen and slack in places, with pieces of narrative seemingly missing and threads left hanging despite its 157-minute length. It was always likely that “Goblet of Fire” would make for a shaky film because the book itself is a bit uncertain: a casual ramble that, toward the end, takes an abrupt shift into the darkest enchantment.
Newell plunges right into that darkness from the opening shot – a serpent emerging from a skull’s gaping mouth. His method mixes economy with a dark purposefulness. He dispenses with much of the familiar ritual of Hogwarts, not just because, by this time, the audience for these movies knows them by heart, but because he is determined to give us a world in which reassurance barely exists.
This is true even of the reassurances our eyes receive: Cinematographer Roger Pratt shoots most of the film in tones of cold blue-gray, midnight spent not under a starry sky but in a neglected graveyard. In some sequences, you have to peer through shadows and mist to make out the characters.
“Goblet of Fire” doesn’t leave you bereft, as Rowling’s latest novel, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” leaves readers. But what links the two works is that they speak to the emotional tenor of a time when the dominant mood is dread.
It was a moment like this, a moment when the very notion of good intentions seemed poisoned amid the horrors of the Vietnam War era, that inspired the Rolling Stones to write “Gimme Shelter.”
At the end of “Goblet of Fire” Michael Gambon’s Dumbledore says the choice that awaits us is between what’s right and what’s easy. Fine words, but words that could be seized on to justify any of the simplifications used to explain our current predicament. What seems more crucial is the peril the young heroes live with as a fact, the vitality of youth shadowed by the closeness of mortality.